https://reason.com/2020/03/05/californias-gig-economy-is-under-attack/California's Gig Economy Is Under AttackA new California law intended to force employers to hire workers as employees rather than treat them as contractors is killing freelance jobs across the Golden State ... .
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Under the law, ride-share companies such as Uber and Lyft will have to reclassify their hundreds of thousands of California drivers as employees, ... .
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While A.B. 5 primarily targets gig economy behemoths like Uber, it also affects numerous other industries. It is now illegal for many types of freelancers to create more than 35 pieces of content in a year for a single company unless the company hires them as an employee. According to a new lawsuit against the state of California, many creative contractors say the limit has already wrought havoc on their livelihoods.
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... Vox Media announced it would not renew the contracts of around 200 California-based journalists who write for the sports website SB Nation, instead replacing those contractors with 20 part-time and full-time employees. Rev, which provides transcription services, and Scripted, which connects freelance copywriters with clients, similarly notified their California contractors that they would no longer give them work.
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Gonzalez, the bill's sponsor, responded to such complaints by tweeting, "These were never good jobs. No one has ever suggested that, even freelancers."
But freelancers beg to differ. ...
The real targets of A.B. 5 were Uber and Lyft, but to create a veneer on constitutionality, the law was written more generally, and @#$%^ed over bunches more people. See, for example,
https://www.10news.com/news/out-of-state-mall-santas-st-nicks-warn-of-ab-5-impacts-in-california ,
http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/another-victim-of-ab-5-musicians-jazz-festival/ , and
https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/californias-ab-5-kills-off-40-year-lake-tahoe-music-festival/ .
